Scannergram

A word game by Kevan Davis and Holly GramazioMonday the 21st of September 2009

Setup

You will need: a set of Scrabble tiles, or some
roughly equivalent lettered squares, and a 30-second timer. (If you
don't have a timer, you can just play each round until everyone has
passed, but a timer speeds the game up.)

Remove all of the "S" tiles from the game (they make it too easy to
just add an "S" to every move),
and place the remaining tiles face down on the table. Take twenty tiles at
random, and - working quickly together, and without thinking about it
too much - assemble them into a "legal" crossword grid (ie. a grid of
words connecting horizontally and vertically). If you can't place a
tile, swap it for a new one.

Play

Figure 1

Figure 3

Figure 2

Take a random face-down tile and place it next to the crossword grid,
face up (see Figure 1). As soon as the tile is visible, all players begin
thinking of ways
to rearrange the crossword grid
into a new form which includes the new letter. The aim is to include that letter tile
in the longest possible word.

Once a player has managed to rearrange the grid in their head, they
call out the number of letters in the word that will hold the new tile,
and start the timer. While the timer runs, if any player (including the
one who's already called) sees a longer word, they may call out its
number of letters.

Using the example crossword grid in Figure 1, a
player sees that he can turn BREW into BRAWL, using the "L" from GUILT
and successfully using up all the spare tiles, as shown in Figure 2.

Without moving the tiles, he calls "five" and starts the timer.

Another
player sees a longer word that would use the new tile - GUITAR, as shown
in Figure 3 - and she calls "six".

When the timer runs out, whoever called out the highest number
must now rearrange the grid to include the new tile in a word
with that many letters. Before moving the tiles, that player must
announce all of the words that they intend to create this turn. (A word
is "created" if it doesn't exist on the grid at the start of the turn,
but exists at the end.) There is no limit to the number of words you can
create in a turn, so long as you are able to name them all before you
start moving the tiles.

For Figure 2, the player would call BRAWL, RILE, NET
and GUT. For Figure 3, the
player would call GUITAR and LENT.

The player then attempts to rearrange the grid to create the words called.

If the player is able to rearrange the grid to accommodate the new tile,
creating the new words named and no others, they score a point.

If they realise they cannot - either because they were mistaken about
the tiles, or because they were bluffing - they may pass before touching
any tiles. The player who called the next lowest number (if such a player
exists) becomes the calling player and repeats this step. If no such player
exists, the round is abandoned and the calling player loses a point.

If the player has begun rearranging the tiles before realising
that they can't complete their words as claimed (either because a legal
crossword grid cannot be formed to include their called words, or because they
inadvertently created a word they didn't call), then their turn is abandoned
and they lose one point. Players then work together to rearrange the crossword
grid into a legal state before continuing.

In all future rounds, players cannot repeat previously called
words. If LENT was called in the first round, no player can use LENT
as a called word in future rounds, even if it would be assembled from an
entirely different set of tiles.

And as a small common-sense rule - the new tile cannot replace an
identical tile in the same position. If BRAWL is in play and another
"A" is drawn, you can't remove the "A" from BRAWL and replace it with
the new "A", before adding "ER" to make BRAWLER. (But you can
rearrange it to make BARREL with the new A, starting from the same B, as
the new A is not in the exact same grid position as the old one.)

If all players agree to pass on a round because nobody can see a
legal play for the new tile, then the tile is discarded and nobody
scores it.

Scores may go negative. The first player to reach a score of five points wins.

Notes

Scannergram was inspired by the rapid grid-rearranging Bananagrams game
(itself a copy of
Pick Two and
Syzygy), after
realising that one of the most enjoyable parts of the game - scavenging
old words and recombining them in clever and unexpected ways - wasn't
particularly rewarded in itself, and was entirely invisible to the other players.

Scannergram is still only a few playtests old. We're trying to refine
a rule for what does and doesn't count as a "called" word - if you're
just stealing one letter from an existing word, it feels like the
shortened word doesn't need to be called.

The game might also benefit from a limit on how many words you can
call in a turn. Perhaps four. The requirement to call words is intended to limit the
amount of rearrangement to however much a player can store in their
short-term memory - in practice this has balanced out, but the game
might break if one player has an exceptionally good short-term visual memory and can
rearrange everything to form a new ten-letter word every round.

If you want a new sample board to get your teeth into, or to challenge
a friend online to beat your solution to, there's a Daily Scannergram
Puzzle.